[Coco] Formatting L.R. Tech Hard Drive in OS9 Level II

[Barry Nelson]

 I have seen several Radio Shack drives that were in fact double sided. They did this because they used the same drives in their IBM compatibles. Some are really singled sided though, mostly the older ones. I owned one I thought was single sided, until one day I found this out and tried to format a double sided disk under OS-9 and it worked. It is very possible.

> Mark J. Blair nf6x at nf6x.net 
> Tue Jan 12 01:13:19 EST 2016
> 
> > On Jan 11, 2016, at 22:02, Barry Nelson <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hmm, most CoCo drives (but not all) are actually 40 track double sided but Disk Basic won't use the extra capacity.
> 
> Most later drives can step out to 40 tracks, despite Disk Basic only supporting 35. But I believe that most if not all all of the drives sold by RS for the CoCo were single sided drives. After all, a second head and corresponding electronics cost real money, and RS was notoriously thrifty. I do have a later RS drive that could only hit 39 tracks, but the drives in this FD500 that I'm using can both step 41 tracks.
> 
> I have some DS drives I can use with this CoCo, but the drive box is disassembled right now since I borrowed one of them for my ImageDisk PC. :) I just need to assemble that box back together after writing out these two Nitros9 images on the PC first.
> 
> I feel like a real dummy for not realizing I was floundering around with DS images and SS drives! I should know better than that. I even characterized and labeled most of my 5.25" drives for SS/DS, max steppable track, and nominal RPM. I just had a brain fart and it didn't click at first that "40d" in the .dsk file name meant double sided.
> 
> -- 
> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
> http://www.nf6x.net/